From: HURH@FNAL.FNAL.GOV (Patrick Hurh)
Subject: Exposure: Vehicle Story
Date: 31 Jan 93 12:09:20 GMT

I'm working on an impossible project....I'm writing sci-fi stories within a
fast, dense hypercard (no flames please) format with 24 bit original
graphics and stereo sound.  The idea is not to blow away the reader with
intense verbose or incredible prose, but to allow the reader to lose
themselves in an information melee of cross-linked hopefully good stories.
I'm a newbie to writing in this format...I don't like stories concentrating
on technology only or weapons...but I'm hoping for some good criticism
without plaguerism.
     This is the first part of the 'vehicle' story....the story that
introduces concepts and plots that are fleshed out in other accompanying
stories (of the stack).  I would really appreciate comments and criticism.
Please remember that this is info dense on purpose and that hopefully
adjacent threads in the story are followed in stories that do not appear
here.

I.   Punching the ceiling.

  The overhead darkness flowed with indigo swells like some deep inverted
ocean, disconcerting.  The matrix far below, a complex glowing circuit; the
immense rippling sheet of blackness scant centimeters above his point of
view.  Oppressing sky stretched out in all directions disappearing in a
horizon line at the same high level as his eyes.
   Dorcas had paused to gather his senses before proceeding with his ace,
but now he reeled with nausea.  Vertigo drew siege on his logic.  The five
seconds he hung there, the moire pattern of darkness swelled from deep
purple and dirt green to a granular bit pattern of black and white.
    "Shit...tres bon with the nerves, Sahgoo."  Somehow his voice never
sounded the same to his mind's ear when he hacked the matrix.  "Twenty
seconds into the breaker and you're scared of the view."
     His hand lay lightly upon the first key of his command sequence.  He
wasn't exactly afraid, he'd done it enough in his lucid dreams, but rather
he felt a  tightness in the back of his neck like a beta-endorphin junkie
before a tunnel high.  His fingers moved slowly but without hesitation away
from the initial pattern of keys that he had been steeling himself to push
over the past two days.  Instead his digits plodded through the familiar
sequence commanding his cheap deck to dim the distracting background
graphics and intensify a 30 degree zenith cone of  vision.  The black and
white granular ceiling brightened, flickered then returned to the rolling
dark purple hues of before.
      Dorcas gently rubbed and circled the centering dimples of his
keyboard with the tips of his middle fingers and, before he could back out,
furiously pounded the opening phrases of a carefully scripted header block.
 The suddeness of this action abruptly dropped him back into hallucination,
damp apartment and keyboard quickly dissolved.
      The swelling waves in front of his upturned face lost their
translucent reflectivity.  Gradually the sheen was replaced by a dark, dull
glimmer.  This local area of absorption grew as Dorcas pushed upwards
through the thick limits of the network.  A uniform pressure across his
face returned his push like a cold pillow.  It conformed to his features,
threw his head back, stilled his progress.  But his purchased ace hacked
on, weakening the thick viscosity of the stretched barrier and enabling a
slow, hesitating progress.  The breaker worked, but more like gelatinous
oil through cloudy water than the sharp and cheap razor burn Dorcas was
used to.
      The increasing pressure against his face pulled at narrow cheeks.
His nose flattened.  Vibrations in the barrier became noticeable,  faint
oscillating staccatto pulses like individual fibers snapping, the pressure
abruptly decreasing after each rapid snap.  The brittle frequency
increased, cracks so close together an ascending whine developed, a
clicking siren.
      The muffled cracks thumped Dorcas' head as the last fibers gave way
uniformly as an elastic wall.  At the sudden loss of restraint, his face
accelerated upwards through a dark void.  Panicking, Dorcas violently
attempted to halt the vertical motion.  He seemed to succeed in slowing the
motion to a faint crawl; however without outside stimulus and the
incredible pressure of moments before, Dorcas quickly lost all spatial
relationship with the matrix.  His muscles jerked with adrenalin as he
whirled to find his bearings.
       His deck interrupted the data stream and injected extremely dilute
quantities of pre-POMC into the folds of his hippocampus.  Dorcas' panic
ebbed.  The cheap unit was programmed for cheap cowboys.  It left Dorcas
floating without purpose but protected.  A better deck would have injected
the met-enkephalin precursor earlier allowing him to ride out the
breakthrough.  Now the deck would not respond to any matrix stimuli.
Whether this was because Dorcas was outside the hardware boundaries of the
net or because the amateur deck's fail-safe mechanisms had left him
stranded Dorcas could only guess.  He slowly rotated his face in all
directions seeking some form of familiar topology.  Utter darkness greeted
him.
        Dorcas could physically jack out now, but he had no idea whether
the ace would work again.  He could imagine it smoking in the one and only
expansion slot his brother's deck had to offer.  He resolved to sit it out.
 The floating sensation was uncomfortable but, unlike the vertigo of
before, this was like being cradled by a cool sea.
       Dorcas waited...

****OK this is the first "card" of the stack...seeing as I can't leave you
with only this much, the next couple follow....but please give me some
feedback...Is this shit any good?****

    Dorcas had chosen over a year ago to use his facial sensory nerves as
his personal interface to the matrix.  Most others preferred the hand
interface, probably a video game hand-eye coordination throwback.  Dorcas
had never and would never be adept at the level of hand-eye coordination
matrix manipulation required.
    When his brother, Horza, first introduced Dorcas to consensual data
hallucination, neural input to the net was limited to the axons which fired
responses to hand and eye stimuli.  This requirement was parameterized by
the crude level of technology present at the time and the complexity of a
real time data model.  Only the extremely dense clusters of neurons in the
Ferrier sensory strip could be utililized as an interface to the wide-band
frequency signals from the net.  This strip of nerve cells was found to be
dominated by sense neurons mapped to both the hands and the face.  Since
communication and motor abilities at one time functioned as the primary
evolutionary survival facets of humans, it was only natural that the
controlling neurons of these organs received emphatic attention from the
dictating gene pool.
    However when the founding creators of the neural net chose a method of
matrix viewpoint control, they did not even consider the face as a
reasonable feedback device.  Unconscious facial movements and gestures were
considered too hard to control, too revealing of the user's true
personality.  Hands were assumed to be the most adaptable impersonal link
to the conscious brain.
    Neural taps which accessed the equally dense facial neurons were
performed only on those who lacked sufficient hand-eye coordination.
People who chose this unique input flew the net not by mentally
manipulating joysticks but by instinctive facial reactions and sheer will
power.  They found themselves to be limited not by their reaction times but
by the control of their reactions.
    Of course when Dorcas made his decision to tap into his facial senses
he only knew that it felt more natural.

    A directional warmth heated the left side of his face.  Dorcas turned
his face to focus on this newfound coordinate.  Vision revealed nothing.  A
matte black scene greeted his dilated eyes.  The source of the warmth he
was feeling seemed quite distant.  Dorcas pushed towards this removed hot
spot.
    Thermal energy bounced off the surface of his face.  The warmth
increased, gradually enfolding him in a gentle heat.  He envisioned himself
falling into a steaming bath of viscous gas.  Dorcas tilted his head up.
Heat, cleft by his chin, breezed by his cheeks.
    No longer pushing, Dorcas felt himself sucked into a hot humid fog.
His eyes still saw only darkness.  As he fell, he felt panic rise again.
The cradling bath was replaced with a sense of paper thin support.  He felt
that at the first sign of a hesitating thought he would lose control and be
dumped headlong into an unseen boiling abyss.  The thought of that
uncontrollable freefall became much more frightening to Dorcas than the
thought of eventually hitting some hidden barrier.  His stomach rose in his
throat.
     Scared once again, Dorcas tried to withdraw from his instinctive
reactions and the fear of falling.  He began the downward spiralling
self-speak...

     What happened to the enkeys?  This bullshit deck had enough opiate
chemicals to flood the receptors of a new born.
      Jack out.
      Sure easy.

              Two more nanos and I woulda ben there...

                               Fuckin' junkie brother.................

                                               Dealin' g-friend..........


                                                       Don't let me.....



fall....




...Horza....

****Next Card****
The whole side of Dorcas' hand hit the jack out key as his pupils
contracted violently.  Sudden blinding light surrounded his sweating head.
Clamping his eyes shut filled his vision with static white.  He pulled his
head back from hanging over the silent deck.  The plug at his neck jerked,
the slack in the neural input cable had run out.  His eyes snapped open as
the 50 yen plug clattered to the floor.  Pupils like tiny black full stops
swam within the grey soup of his irises.
     Dorcas looked down at the grey keyboard, thinking it used to be white.
 He was acutely aware of the silhouetted figure in the doorway.
     Horza.
     Dorcas tried to force his eyes to accept more light so he could figure
out if Horza was high.  In any case it wouldn't hurt to smile.  Dorcas'
thick lips stretched back in the facsimile of a sheepish grin.
     Horza crossed the room to the deck.  With a finger lightly on the hot
ace breaker, he looked up at Dorcas.
     "Brother, you are in for a mess of shit."
     "Horza, it's not like you haven't tried."
     "Yeah, but new yen don't come without old troubles.  Every time you
jack now, you try to get out.  Your yen goes straight to Junior every time
you make a half decent run.  Face it, the matrix is just a construct dreamt
up by mega-boys with _toys_.  It ain't the home of magic truths or
spiritual loas.  Heaven's on earth brother.  You gotta look inside to find
the real truths."
     Dorcas wiped his shiny face, "I was through!  Your fuckin' lame deck
knocked me down again..."
     "If I didn't owe dosh on that lame deck, I'd knock you and the fuckin'
thin out the window!"
     "Right, and lose your tie job..."
     "My tie job?!  My tie job keeps you off..."
     "Your tired ass tie job keeps you in your earthly heaven, Horza.  I
don't see one yen of what you make.  Don't give me shit about what you do
to keep me safe.  Save it for mom next time you scrimp enough to put
batteries in her."
      Horza's eyes rolled.  He turned his back, stepped away from Dorcas.
      "Mom...", Horza slumped into a ratty chair.  "I'm given up, man."
      Dorcas stood up, pried the soft from the deck slot, and stared at
Horza.
      "You just tunnel or what?"
      "Derm."
      Horza rolled his wrist over to show the blue glint of beta.  "Jenny's
comin' over in a while.  You gotta meet her, man."
      Dorcas stepped across the deck and pulled the limp derm from Horza's
upturned wrist.
      "Hey...", Horza protested weakly.
      Dorcas looked down at Horza.  "You just got a tunnel three weeks ago.
 You don't need this shit to get high.  Just need a good scare."  Dorcas
slapped the derm on the side of his own neck.  "Boo."
      Dorcas picked up his jacket and moneybelt from the floor.  Horza
stared at him.
      "How'd you get in here ...anyway?  I thought I grabbed your tape..."
      Dorcas paused by the door.  "Have fun in your blue heaven brother."
      The bolts tumbled behind the door that Dorcas shut.


****I have to say that the graphics in the actual stack are top rate...and
I would love some response to this _first_ posting.  (be gentle please)
O'course this is all copyrighted by me, Patrick Hurh, 1993 (what ever that
is worth). Please E-mail me at HURH.FNAL.FNAL.GOV****